More from yesterday

Yesterday morning, of course, I had to drag my children out of bed to leave the house—because we actually had somewhere to be. This morning, Benjamin woke up early—because we have no where to be. That's just the way the world works, I guess.

Miriam is still sleeping though...maybe.

When I went in to wake her up yesterday, I flipped on the light and said, "Time to get up, sweetie! You have preschool this morning!"

She bolted out of bed and said, "Oh, yeah! I forgot! I wasn't sleeping. I was just getting my thumb-sucking in!"

So apparently she sometimes wakes up but stays in bed to suck her thumb—because no one's there to remind her not to do it. During the day I will remind her if I catch her (she is five, after all, and should be kicking this habit) but I haven't been saying anything about nighttime...yet.

I have a feeling that her thumb sucking habit is what's helped her be such a good sleeper all these years. Her dentist keeps assuring me that it's not a problem until she starts losing her baby teeth so we probably have a few years to get her to quit, but she loves her thumb.

Some people say that a thumb sucking habit is the worst but I, frankly, think the trade off was beautiful. Would you rather have a self-soothing thumb-sucker or a refuses-to-put-anything-in-their-mouth-but-breast scream-all-the-timer? The choice is clear to me, even if we're still battling thumb sucking years down the road.

Rachel lost her first tooth when she was 6.5 and the second tooth followed soon after but she hasn't lost any others, so Miriam still has a good two years, probably, before we really have to worry.

I told Andrew about Miriam last night and he thought it was pretty funny. But not as funny as he found this little exchange...

"I went to the post office," I said.

"What?! You packed up the kids and left the house for the express purpose of going to the post office?" he asked.

"Well, no," I said. "I stopped by on the way home after dropping Miriam off at preschool."

"Ah," he said. "That makes more sense. You never just run errands."


"I know!" I said. "It's pretty pathetic when I have to sit down to rest before driving home after standing in line for twenty minutes."

"You what?" he laughed (and not, like, little chuckles—but, like, tears-streaming-down-his-face guffawing).

"I had to sit down outside of the post office before I could drive home! It's not funny—I was going to faint or throw up or something."

"You're right. That's not funny." He laughed some more. "That's pretty pathetic, actually."

"In my defense, I think walking for twenty minutes would have been easier. I don't know what was so wrong about standing in line...but it was definitely not what I should have been doing at that moment."

"But that's hilarious. You had to rest after standing in line. I just can't..."

"It threw off my whole day! I felt fine. Then I stood in line. And then I wanted to die."

The man would not stop laughing at me. But considering he's run the bulk of the errands for the past three months I think I'll forgive him. Oh, and never run an errand ever again.